Johannesburg

6 December 2013.

It is a searing hot day in Johannesburg. Gin has returned to the city of her birth to throw a party for her mother’s eightieth birthday. She is determined, with lists and meals and flower arrangements, to show that she has become a fully capable woman. She knows, deep down, her mother will only ever see a lost cause.

Meanwhile outside, crowds of citizens and the world’s media have gathered to hear the expected announcement: Nelson Mandela has died.

Set across the course of a single momentous day and narrated by a chorus of voices, Fiona Melrose’s second novel is a hymn to an extraordinary city and its people, an ambitious homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and a devastating personal and political manifesto on mothers and daughters, justice and love.

‘Beautifully observed’ Mail on Sunday

‘Woolf produced blooms that are impossible to emulate. Johannesburg provides evidence of a novelist who can grow inimitable flowers herself’ Spectator